Storytelling In Literature

Before reviewing literature, in order to determine the status of our research in the literature, it is necessary to discuss about previous studies that have addressed the role of storytelling in management and leadership. Storytelling already plays an important role for organizations and their leaders and many theorists and researchers highlighted the value of storytelling (Gill, 2014). Management scholars have recognized story and narrative’s role in culture (Hyde, 2008; Rindfleish, Sheridan and Kjeldal, 2009; Boje and Baskin. 2011; Ohara and Cherniss, 2012), teaching (Phillips, 1995; Boston, 2103), sharing knowledge (Lerner, 1992; Sole and Wilson, 1999; Tobin and Snyman, 2008), communication (Kirsch, 2004; Mittins, Abratt and Christie, 2011;

For example, Boyce (1996) uses social constructivism, organizational symbolism, and critical theory to review storytelling literature. Snowden (2000) is another example. He reviews storytelling literature and identifies four approaches to the use of stories within an organizational context: stories as a research tool; enhancing actual stories; embracing fiction; and traditional forms of story. The use of stories as a research tool received increasing interest with the growth of post-modernism and its emphasis on the authenticity of narrative. The purpose here is to gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their member’s experiences. A second group creates or reflects on actual stories from their companies and enhance or expand these to make a point. A third group freely embraces fiction – seeing stories as seen a means of conveying meaning, stimulating a response and enhancing understanding of complex issues. The fictional format allows indirect tackling of

(2011) shows the effectiveness of storytelling whit a conceptual reasoning and Beigi (2014) considers the effectiveness of a particular source of story, i.e. fiction, in facilitating training and development. This paper is going to discuss the effectiveness of storytelling to meet HRD purposes, by finding some evidences from literature. Our research is similar to Caminotti and Gray (2012) research. The aim of this literature review is not criticizing the storytelling literature, but we are looking for finding some information and evidence to demonstrate the potential relevance of storytelling in HRD. It is worth noting that we do not claim this research is a sort of integrative and comprehensive literature review. In an integrative literature review, the researchers should critique literature written on a phenomena (Callahan, 2014), but in this paper we are not going to critique storytelling literature, rather, we seek to gather, analyze and synthesize information in the literature to increase awareness of how effective storytelling can be for HRD practitioners. So, we can claim that we have tried to see the relevant literature to our purpose of paper, as much as